Recently, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed that Muslim women be prohibited from wearing head-to-toe coverings. Should Western countries have the right to impose a dress code?

In 2004, shortly after the French government passed a ban on girls' wearing head scarves to school, I rode the Métro with a young, religious Franco-Tunisian student. She was wearing a head scarf that covered her hair and reached below her collar.

"Watch the reaction of people on this train to me and my scarf," she said as we searched for a seat. "Everyone will give me a dirty look."

I had not thought much of it, but she was right. Ordinary-looking French housewives turned to gape at her; children giggled; a man opposite us actually grimaced.

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At the time, I was reporting a story on Muslim integration in Europe. As up to 10 percent of France's 64 million people are Muslim — the highest percentage in Western Europe — I was trying to see how religion could integrate successfully with secular society. On that train ride to Bobigny, the grim suburb where violent riots erupted in 2005, I saw what it was like to be in the skin of someone who chooses to make a physical statement about her religion.

This past June, French lawmakers decided to begin considering whether the burka, used in France as a blanket term to include all traditionally Muslim full-body coverings worn with a niqab (face veil), threatens French secularism. President Nicolas Sarkozy, a man not known for mincing words, went as far as to say that the burka was "not welcome" in France. The French National Assembly then created a panel to launch an inquiry over a six-month period to discuss the future of the garment.

The issue has triggered a heated debate among intellectuals, human-rights groups, and Islamic clerics arguing about individual freedoms versus assimilation.

Though the burka is rare in France — the hijab, or head scarf, is more common — a ban would mean that women who chose to wear it would not have the right to make that choice.

"We would be the only Western country to tell women what they can and cannot wear," says Paris-based writer Ariane Quentier, who lived and worked in Afghanistan for four years.

Speaking in Cairo in early June (several weeks before President Sarkozy proposed the ban), President Obama said, "It is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit — for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We can't disguise hostility toward any religion behind the pretense of liberalism."

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Part of the logic behind the ban goes back to the strict French code of läicité — the separation of church and state that was written into French law in 1905. Although France is culturally and historically Catholic, it has no official religion. It should be noted that when the head scarf was banned in public schools in 2004, the Jewish skullcap and large crucifixes were also forbidden.

But Franco-Muslim leaders view it as discrimination. "To raise the subject via a parliamentary committee is a way of stigmatizing Islam and the Muslims of France," said Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion. "We are shocked by the idea Parliament should be put to work on such a marginal issue."

For Paris-based designers whose clients include devout Muslim women, the issue presents a problem. "We are getting into the most private of private matters," asserts a designer who declined to be named for fear of offending his wealthy Middle Eastern clientele. "This is about people's religious beliefs but also what goes on inside their homes. Is it up to the president of the French Republic to decide that?"

Giambattista Valli, who dresses many Muslim women, puts the uproar in a historical context: "It's like a flag or a Mao jacket. The impact is huge in our minds."

Reem Debs, a Valli client, grew up in Lebanon and finds Muslims who wear the burka in France "offensive. It's not what my religion — Islam — is about. It's not in the Koran."

Debs is chic and lithe and could pass as Cameron Diaz's twin sister. When I met her, she bounded down the stairs of the Meurice hotel in Paris in jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of Louboutin heels. "My family are probably the oldest Shia family in Lebanon," she explains, "and I've never even worn a head scarf. It has nothing to do with being spiritual."

There is also the argument that wearing a burka doesn't help young Muslims or new immigrants blend into French society, a big problem within the Muslim-secular divide here.

As Valli points out, "In the Muslim world, Western women don't wear miniskirts and bleached hair so as not to offend the people who live there. So in France, should Muslim women wear a burka if it is provocative to nonbelievers?"

On the other hand, he adds, "Integration is important, but you don't have to abandon your roots, your DNA. I have been in Paris for years, but I am Italian. I need my pizza and spaghetti. Yet I respect the culture here in France."

Quentier is divided. "I'm totally against the burka itself because it's a sign of domination of women," she says. "My French female ancestors fought for females to be free, and it's betraying them."

But Quentier, who says she didn't wear a burka when she was working with the U.N. in Afghanistan but did cover up when she met tribal elders in the countryside, also insists, "What worries me is telling people what they can wear. Even in Afghanistan, there is not actual legislation [since the 2001 fall of the Taliban] that forces women to wear the burka. It's a cultural choice made by the family, not by the law."

Designer Allegra Hicks, whose collection includes caftans she transforms into eveningwear, says, "I find the burka, as a visual object, a thing of beauty. What I don't find beautiful is what it represents."

English-born socialite, designer, and UNICEF U.K. ambassador Jemima Khan takes a philosophical approach. "The issue for me is not so much the burka but coercion," Khan says. "It is important to make the distinction between the compulsory burka as worn under the Taliban and one worn by choice."

Khan, who lived in Pakistan for years when she was married to native cricketer-cum-politician Imran Khan, acknowledges that it is often hard for Westerners to understand why some women choose to wear such garb for religious, cultural, or political reasons. "My sisters-in-law, all professional women, always wore the burka when visiting their ancestral village in Mianwali," she says. "A Muslim woman, like a nun who wears the habit or a Sikh who wears a turban, should have the right to choose both what she wears and how she interprets her religion."

Khan's thoughts strike a nerve with me. A few days after the Taliban fell, I was walking down the street in Kabul when I heard giggling behind me. It was three teenage girls in burkas.

"Why are you still wearing them?" I asked, trying to make eye contact behind the fabric grille. "Take them off! You're free now!"

"We don't want to," one said. "It's not safe yet. We will take it off when we feel ready."